Watson's World

Last year was the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure
of DNA and the 75th birthday of codiscoverer James D. Watson,
prompting a flurry of books that portray Watson as an untiring
promoter of DNA and its place in science and society. The premise of
Inspiring Science is that "the age of DNA"
has been greatly shaped by Watson's activities.

Watson's actual research on DNA, from 1950 to 1953, was of
relatively short duration, so the bulk of the volume consists of the
testimony of more than 50 individuals, most of them molecular
biologists, about his effect on them or on the institutions with
which he was associated: the Biological Laboratories at Harvard
University (1956 to 1976), the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (1968
to the present) and the National Center for Human Genome Research
(as it was then named) at the National Institutes of Health (1988 to
1992). Many of the book's contributors are now influential figures
in their own right (half a dozen are Nobel laureates). This volume
demonstrates that Watson's importance derives not so much from his
discoveries or scientific ideas (other than the double helix, of
course) as from his remarkable ability to recruit and shape the
careers of the next generation of scientists and from his various
projects for spreading DNA literacy through outreach, education and publishing.

Watson's pervasive influence is traced chronologically as he
evolves from a student in the 1940s into a research scientist in the
1950s; a research manager, mentor and author in the 1960s; and an
administrator and a promoter of the public understanding of science
since the 1970s, when basic research on DNA came to be overshadowed
by its far-reaching applications in the biotech industry and by the
Human Genome Project. Watson has overseen not only a research center
but also the publication of textbooks, laboratory manuals and
journals, as well as educational projects ranging from community
outreach to a graduate school, which bears his name. Indeed, he is
credited with having converted an almost bankrupt, dilapidated
laboratory into a "DNA Town" with a research, teaching and
conference center; community outreach programs; a publishing house;
and new buildings, including hosting facilities.

The first section of the book contains essays by Renato Dulbecco,
Gunther Stent and Seymour Benzer, who met Watson during his graduate
studies at Indiana University (from 1947 to 1950) and got to know
him as the youngest member of the Phage Group. All three are adept
storytellers. Their anecdotes feature brash behavior but also reveal
Watson to have been unusually well-informed about both science and
scientists. He is portrayed as a perceptive but opinionated master
of gossip, who knew how to take advantage of the intertwined
scientific and social pecking orders. He appears to have had an
early capacity for opportunistically "surveying the
landscape" while calculating well in advance his next move,
free from any burden of loyalties. The competitive atmosphere in
graduate school presumably toughened him to aspire to always come in
first. Watson "had few filters between his mental processes and
verbal expression of his opinions," says Dulbecco, who endured
his share of outbursts and offensive comments but maintains that
Watson's "unedited" opinions were invariably useful to
him. Stent's recollections zero in on Watson's clever manipulation
of unsuspecting older scientists. He reports that Watson admitted to
having managed to relocate to the Cavendish lab at the University of
Cambridge—for which he was scientifically unprepared—by
misinforming his prospective hosts as to his intentions and plans.

The section on Watson's two-year stay at the University of Cambridge
is disappointingly brief. Despite considerable public interest in
the still unresolved ethical, historical, social and scientific
issues surrounding the discovery of the double helix, no effort was
made to include an updated statement by Watson or the other
protagonists regarding Watson's position on those issues. A letter
to Watson from Max Perutz, written shortly before his death in 2002,
focuses on Watson's manners, and an essay by Francis Crick deals
with his work with Watson on the structure of viruses in the
mid-1950s, on the grounds that this aspect of their collaboration is
less known. A reminiscence by Sydney Brenner, who first met Watson
in the Cavendish Laboratory, perceptively calls attention to his
profound understanding of the "politics of getting things done."

The reception of the model of the double helix in the United States
is reflected in the comments of 11 participants in the June 1953
symposium at Cold Spring Harbor, where Watson introduced the model
to the virus research community. Most of their recollections include
an obvious dose of hindsight (a common malaise in the scientific
community), but Charles Yanofsky and Waclaw Szybalski make it clear
that acceptance of the double-helix theory was neither automatic nor unanimous.

Watson's somewhat anticlimactic postdoctoral years at Caltech from
1953 to 1955 are recalled in an illuminating essay by Alex Rich, who
recounts in impressive detail his and Watson's failed joint efforts
to find a double helix in RNA. Paul Doty's and E. O. Wilson's
overviews of Watson's time at Harvard are particularly insightful
essays that complement each other nicely: Doty puts the best
possible spin on this segment of Watson's career, whereas Wilson (in
an excerpt from Naturalist) suggests that the nickname Watson earned
through his zealous crusade against the declining empire of
classical biology—"the Caligula of
biology"—was well deserved. It is unfortunate that this
section includes no essay by Wally Gilbert, who is widely known for
being the most important discovery Watson made at Harvard.

Even if one accepts Doty's generous assessment that Watson had a
flair for tackling risky and important problems (most notably mRNA)
and takes at face value the praise of former postdocs and students
(such as Benno Müller-Hill, Joan Steitz and Mark Ptashne),
Watson's two decades at Harvard were a period during which his
"literary" accomplishments outshone his scientific ones.
Molecular Biology of the Gene, first published in 1965,
became a successful textbook, which saw several editions, and
The Double Helix (1968) became a bestseller despite
Harvard University Press's refusal to publish it.

Notable essays on Watson's role as the entrepreneurial director of
the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory were contributed by former
director John Cairns, who recalls the decade prior to Watson's
arrival; Norton D. Zinder, whose "job" it was to dissuade
Watson from frequent resignations; Anne Skalka (one of only two
women contributors), who recalls her experience as a postdoc in
Alfred Hershey's group in the mid-1960s (before Watson's arrival as
director); and Philip Sharp, who recounts his mildly strained
experience as a postdoc participating in the Nobel
Prize–winning discovery of gene splicing in the early 1970s.
Also, half a dozen younger protégés, including Raymond
F. Gesteland and Thomas Maniatis, explain Watson's decisive
influence on them.

Several trustees of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory reveal an unknown
side of Watson as a persistent administrator, who—despite his
reputation for difficult manners—eventually mastered community
public relations and the art of fund-raising. The lab's wealthy
neighbors donated estates or approved visionary land acquisitions,
new buildings and endless landscaping, often under Watson's threats
to resign, cleverly delivered while storming in or out with hair and
shoelaces undone so as to best convey the presumably more persuasive
allure of a mad genius.

Watson's tenure as director of the NIH side of the Human Genome
Project was short and turbulent. The appointment ended when NIH
Director Bernardine Healy fired him (over differences of opinion on
the patenting of genes and her perception that he had conflicts of
interests because of his ties to the pharmaceutical industry). All
of the contributors who discuss this phase of Watson's career insist
that he played a key role in forging the initial consensus needed to
gain support for the project. Robert Cook-Deegan makes a most
insightful argument on the unintended consequences of Watson's
decision not to fund cDNA research at NIH. Nancy Wexler illuminates
Watson's role in allocating funds for studying the ethical, legal
and social implications of science (the ELSI initiative)—an
allocation that played an important role in securing social and
congressional goodwill for the project.

Bruce Alberts and David Botstein, among others, recall Watson's
profound interest in the public understanding of science and his
role in producing innovative textbooks and inspiring undergraduates
with public lectures on frontier science. Coeditors Inglis and
Witkowski describe Watson's initiatives in expanding the publishing
and conference programs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Interspersed among the personal recollections of colleagues are
other items of scientific and historical interest: a selection of
Watson's scientific papers and a bibliography of his writings; a
revealing obituary Watson wrote for Max Delbrück; photographs,
some previously published and some new; and several interesting
"literary" productions. The latter include a brief letter
from nonagenarian British novelist Naomi Mitchison, who was the
mother of Watson's scientist friend Avrion, the daughter of
physiologist J. S. Haldane and the sister of biologist J. B. S.
Haldane. She remembers "that Jim was more or less in love with
me" when he visited her home in 1956. (Twelve years later, he
dedicated The Double Helix to her.)

The three editors should be commended for their effort in assembling
so much informative and entertaining material on a celebrity
scientist. The recollections contained here are likely to help
change the simplistic image of Watson as a "crazy genius"
searching for answers to the "secret of life." The
editors' introductions to each section, however, apparently meant to
dissuade reading between the lines, should have been omitted.
Similarly, their "Timeline" juxtaposing Watson's
accomplishments and honors with landmarks in the history of
20th-century science smacks of a pretentious "cult of
personality." The foreword by Matt Ridley is also overdone,
arguing for Watson's uniqueness in exaggerated terms.

These recollections, combining authenticity and insight with
hindsight, will greatly help with the task of situating Watson's
contributions to the history of molecular biology and the age of
DNA. However, that task cannot be undertaken until more symmetrical
analyses, ones that systematically cover failures as well as
successes, become possible. Yet half a story, the better half to be
sure, is better than no story at all.—Pnina Geraldine
Abir-Am, Visiting Scholar, Program in Women's Studies,
Northeastern University, Boston